ANGOLA, ALGERIA, KENYA, ZIMBABWE AND AFRICA’S GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY
Okello Oculi canvasses for Africa Xi Jinping’s notion of a community in rhythm of shared development
President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, told ANC members that after 1994 people who did not share ANC’s commitment to the welfare of the people, flocked into the party to steal government money.
He was addressing members of the African National Congress, reflecting after the shock of losing a large number of seats to scores of small political parties in 2021 Local Government elections. Devoted supporters of the ANC had chosen not to vote at all rather than support new ‘’pretenders’’ promising another dawn.
Journalists heard complaints and disappointments about local ANC officials not giving them roads, health clinics, tap water; not collected garbage from communities; not providing toilets; and not removing poor folks from shacks into decent housing. All signposts to freedom and good living which people had bled for; suffered police batons and torture in prisons during the struggle against ‘’apartheid’’ had not arrived. The revolution had poured honey into few mouths.
In July 2021, the wretched of the earth exploded with a looting hunger for consumer goods they had only consumed from television screens. Rage also set fire to what was out of reach for poor folks. The ANC was watching its legitimacy going up in flames.
The Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA), suffered similar electoral rebuke by supporters. They stayed away from voting in the August 2022 elections. It won by a mere 50.9 per cent of votes of 40 per cent of those who cared to reach polling booths. MPLA lacks the wide social base of the ANC. Its rival, Jonas Savimbi, had imported into Angola violence and tribalism in the history and politics of Switzerland where he got his education. Like Sierra Leone, Libya, and Liberia, his highland region suffered prejudice by urban elites in Luanda, the capital.
His notion of ‘’total independence’’ rejected both Portuguese and Mulato rule. When Agustinho Neto, a medical doctor, built a SOCIALIST movement, Savimbi became the darling of anti-Socialist Cold War powers. He became a potential promise for future access to Angola’s rich oil deposits. When the MPLA later showed willingness to deal with CHEVRON, AGIP and other oil guzzlers, he was assassinated.
The decline of electoral support for the ANC and MPLA as liberation movements had been noted in Kenya under Jomo Kenyatta; Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe and Algeria under Ahmed Ben Bella. In Zimbabwe loss of support came after Mugabe withdrew free health care, free education and transferring land from European immigrants to his liberation fighters. These were conditions for receiving loans from the IMF/WORLD BANK.
At the core of this drama was the ascendancy of ‘’INDIVIDUALISM’’ over ‘COMMUNITYISM’. Bitter TRIBAL wars of 1810 to 1848 across Europe entrenched INDIVIDUALISM as an ideology for organising society. In contrast, Africa’s wars of liberation from European colonial exploitation – itself a very brutal and genocidal manifestation of INDIVIDUALISM – drew vital energy from traditional ‘COMMUNITYISM’.
COMMUNITYISM or ‘nationism’ is vital for Democracy. Julius Nyerere noted that Democracy survives where politics is not regarded as a civil war; and the welfare of losers in elections is not terminated by winners. In America’s history, however, violence against African-Americans denied her growth into a ‘NATION’’ with a shared humanity suitable for democracy.
Candidate Donald Trump used violence in his election campaigns. It was inevitable that his promise that he would only recognise the result of a presidential election only IF HE WON, would roll into the January 6, 2020 armed invasion of CAPITOL Building to prevent the swearing of Biden as the new president. States where his supporters are in power are passing laws that disqualify African-Americans from voting in the November 2022 elections; as well as attacks on Asians, Jews, Haitians, Nigerians and other immigrants.
When President Biden hosts African leaders in December, 2022, we must hope that AFRICAN GUESTS will offer to export ‘COMMUNITYISM or ‘OBUNTU’’ to heal and nurture America’s struggle to protect healthy portions of her ‘’DEMOCRACY’’; and therapy to uproot her historic cancerous INDIVIDUALISM.
Thabo Mbeki warned that purging ‘INDIVIDUALISM’ out of the ANC will be bitter and challenging. He probably recalled MAO ZEDUNG’S ‘’CULTURAL REVOLUTION’’ which purged enemies of China’s new revolution born from massive peasants at guerrilla war.
Trump shows that the –so-called ‘’mature democracies’’ are cancer patients with silent and open politics of violence. The deception of Mikhail Gorbachev over his vision of a cooperative post-Cold War Euro-America, must be attributed to the INDIVIDULISM which President Eisenhower saw embedded in the ‘’Military-Industrial Complex’’. Africa must ally with Xi Jinping’s notion of a community in rhythm of shared development.
Brilliant colonised political engineers planed landmines in our countries. It is, however, ANGOLA, ALGERIA, ZIMBABWE that bear Africa’s responsibility for injecting ‘COMMUNITYISM’ into global movement forward.
Prof Oculi writes from Abuja
